The Non-Glamorous Side of Photography

One of the benefits of having a solid social media presence is being able to test and review photography-related products and services. Recently on Twitter, I was introduced to Keyword Smart, so in exchange for being able to use their product, I agreed to provide them with a review. In the past I’ve written about photo keywording strategy so that would be a good primer into how I approach keywording. So without further ado, let’s get into the review.

Why?

The goal of Keyword Smart and other photo keywording software is generally to help ensure that all of your important bases are covered in an efficient manner. Keywording images is a laborious task that many photographers do not enjoy but it is a necessary task if you expect to sell your photography effectively. Keywording not only allows clients to search through your images on their own, but also to help you as the photographer find your own images for urgent photo requests. Maybe if you are first starting off, you can remember the content within all of your images off the top of your head and be able to find them, but once you are more than a few years into your photography career, this will not be possible nor advised.

Keyword Smart is a web-based tool with an innovative approach to streamlining this process. It allows you to enter in your existing keywords into the bulk keyword box then it auto-populates those keywords into keyword taxonomy categories where it generates a master list of synonym and plural terms. You can then use the drop-down menus to drill further down into each keyword category and select additional keywords. These keyword categories are meant to ensure you have entered in keywords for all the types of terms you might not be aware that photo editors typically use such as “no people” or “action shot” for instance.

Keyword Smart / keywordsmart.com

Cognizant that many photographers enter in their photo meta data within Adobe Lightroom, there is a plugin available that integrates with Lightroom. My workflow doesn’t currently involve keywording within Lightroom so I haven’t tried this feature but I think it sounds like a great feature for those who keyword within Lightroom.

Since Keyword Smart operates as a subscription, web-based tool, their keyword catalog is constantly being updated based on industry feedback and user-behavior. I think this is great method to eventually building up a very accurate, up-to-date keyword catalog. As is, they already claim to have over 130,000 keywords within their system at the time of this review. As the keyword catalog grows, I see this further speeding up the keyword process for photography industry professionals.

Now let’s take a look at the keywords I was able to produce. I chose three images of different genres in order to highlight diversity within the keyword sets.

My grizzly bear cub image had 51 keywords when I originally keyworded the image. For the purposes of this review, I started from scratch when building the new keyword list from Keyword Smart, which ended up producing the 105 keywords listed above. Going through the keywording process via Keyword Smart, helped me to come up keywords that I had never considered previously. It’s impossible to know if having these additional keywords will lead to increased revenue at this point, but this will potentially give me more chances to sell my work which is all we can hope for with great keywording technique.

In the above rodeo image, I had 46 keywords when I originally keyworded this image last year. Through Keyword Smart, I generated a list of 91 keywords. Clearly this is helping me build a more comprehensive keyword list of important terms. These are not just filler keywords, there are some real descriptive terms that I’m getting out of this.

Pasadena City Hall at Sunset, California

This photo of Pasadena City Hall is a new one that I don’t have existing keywords for but I did come up with 79 keywords for this example.

Overall: I have just scratched the surface of what can be done with Keyword Smart. In addition to the features I’ve already mentioned, there is the ability to edit your own taxonomy to fit your personal keywording style, which I like a lot. I intend to make heavy use of this feature which I believe will help take my workflow to the next level. I am frequently keywording images so any edge I can get on this, you can bet that I will take advantage of. Based on my communications with the owner, it’s clear that they are serious about building a quality product for photographers and art buyers, so I will wholeheartedly recommend trying out Keyword Smart.

The primary reason why I started composing my own soundtracks for my YouTube motion-picture videos is because it’s too difficult if not impossible to license good music on a small budget. So I figured that since I used to write my own tunes for fun when I was playing saxophone in the college jazz program & in grad school, so why not pick it back up again? I rarely play the sax these days, but I still have a cheap guitar or two laying around the house so it made sense to try hacking something out of them.

I used to record with a Shure instrument mic plugged into my PC’s sound card whether I was recording a saxophone, guitar or keyboard track. Since I didn’t know anything about recording techniques and equipment, I found it difficult to record my alto saxophone playing in particular because the sound kept distorting due to extreme volume. But this time around, I had another problem also. My 30W Marshall amp blew up due to an electrical problem at home a few months ago. I wasn’t in the mood to spend another $400 – 500 to replace it, so I looked around Guitar Center’s website for a multi-effects processor with which I could use in substitution for the guitar amp. A major benefit to using one of these devices is that you can plug straight into your USB port and record directly into the computer without worrying about mics and ambient sound conditions. The sound records much cleaner this way.

Another reason why I chose to purchase the $99 DigiTech RP150 multi-effects pedal instead of buying a new amp to record is because I sold my “hard rock” guitar two years ago leaving me only with a $150 Fender Strat. I hate the sound of this guitar because it is too tinny, but I keep using because I like the way that it feels. With an effects processor though, I can create whatever tones I want even with this cheap Strat. An added bonus is that there is a built-in drum machine with this device. Previously, I programmed drum rhythms on my MIDI keyboard.

Keep in mind that you can create music for your slideshows even if you play keyboards or other instruments, you just have to be able to plug a quality recording device into your computer and have recording software. Most keyboards should be able to plug directly into the computer though, so that’s not an issue.

As for the software – I use open source freeware software like Audacity to record and Photostage for the slideshows. But I’ve used Pro Show Gold in the past for slideshows and think that it is a much better program allowing for more creativity.

Essentially I have been producing these YouTube videos with under $300 worth of gear. Now if only getting all the photos could be done on that sort of budget… Perhaps sometime in the future, I will get into the basics of choosing music and editing for photography videos.